The future of music journalism is to put it lightly, bleak. In recent ABC magazine circulation figures released this week sales of IPC Media’s NME, whose recently appointed new editor Krissi Murison is due to take control on September 1 following the departure of Conor McNicholas, plummeted more than 27% year on year and hovered just above 40,000 weekly copies in June. Meanwhile sales of Bauer Media’s metal title Kerrang! dropped by an alarming 28% year on year to 43,253. As a whole the magazine industry’s music sector recorded an overall slump in sales of 9.4%.
In fact the only music publication to buck the trend is the depressingly titled Classic Rock which recorded a 5.5% jump in sales to 70,301 per month. Going on lose sterio types then it seems the only group buying music magazines at the moment are 40-50 year old balding 'rawkers' who still haven't quite come to terms yet with the fact Led Zeppelin will never put on a full reunion tour.
This figure does go some way to explaining the rapid decline of the New Musical Express though. It's a publication that has always been linked to the younger end of the market, a tradition that was deepened further by Conor McNicholas with a series of covers on popular youth culture such as Skins and The Mighty Boosh.
Furthermore, after the relative collapse of the Britpack (Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party and the Kaiser Chiefs) the NME has seemingly spent the last two years without an iconic indie posterboy/girl whilst having to settle for heavy coverage on populist but unexciting options including The Enemy, Kings Of Leon and Biffy Clyro. Add to this a writing team that seem to think the entire point of a review is to either name drop incessantly, make any number of outlandish statements without hope of backing them up or to produce an ode to your own sense of self importance and the future can only spell 'T-R-O-U-B-L-E'.
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